Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. still imports lithium from other countries like Argentina, Chile, Russia, and China. Geothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheaper solar and wind power, despite its proven potential. But this may soon change – for an unexpected reason.

DWR’s Salton Sea Unit supports the California Natural Resources Agency’s Salton Sea Management Program (SSMP), created by then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s Salton Sea Task Force to address the urgent public and ecological health issues resulting from the drying and shrinking of the Salton Sea. The issues include air quality impacts from dust emissions and loss of important wildlife habitat.

While the SSMP is a long-range program, its immediate focus is on the development and implementation of the Phase I: 10-Year Plan. We support the SSMP and the Phase I Plan by providing planning, engineering, and environmental expertise for design and implementation of dust-suppression and habitat projects. The Phase I Plan includes projects that will be completed as early as the end of 2022. Proposition 1 provided $80 million in funding for SSMP implementation.

Including one long-awaited and colossal German satellite. It’s never too late to join the party when you’re headed to space.

On Friday, April 1 at 12:24 p.m. ET, Falcon 9 launched Transporter-4, SpaceX’s fourth dedicated smallsat rideshare program mission, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This was the seventh launch and landing of this Falcon 9 stage booster, which previously supported launch of Crew-1, Crew-2, SXM-8, CRS-23, IXPE, and one Starlink mission. Following stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

Continue reading “Transporter-4 Mission” »

Will it be the next Black Hawk?

NASHVILLE March 31, 2022 — After three years of proving its transformational flight capabilities, the Lockheed Martin Sikorsky-Boeing SB1 DEFIANT® helicopter arrived in Nashville this week to give U.S. Army Aviators a first-hand look at this impressive aircraft at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual summit.

Army aviators at the summit will be able to see how Team DEFIANT is revolutionizing Future Vertical Lift, one of the Army’s top modernization priorities, with a focus on transforming the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program’s capabilities, production and sustainment resulting in lower-life cycle costs. The result is DEFIANT X® a complete weapon system that builds on the handling qualities and capabilities proven by the team’s technology demonstrator, SB1 DEFIANT®.

Continue reading “SB>1 DEFIANT Helicopter Completes Long-Endurance Flight to Nashville” »

No celebrities flew to space after SNL’s Pete Davidson pulled out. Blue Origin completed its fourth crewed spaceflight, taking six passengers up into suborbital space.

According to conspiracy theorists, this popular Air Force testing facility is a secret research center for studying alien technology. So what’s the truth and why did people want to raid Area 51 back in 2019?

And it could mean signs of the war will remain for a long time. Reports are in that Russian forces are laying “smart” landmines in Ukraine that are only able to target soldiers. Called the POM-3 “Medallion” landmine, these anti-personal weapons are activated, allegedly, specialist seismic target sensors.

Once the conflict ends, it is important to begin the process of “demining.” The goal is to clear the land of any explosive devices that pose a risk to the population. Currently, there are an estimated 110 million landmines scattered across dozens of war-torn countries, and approximately 26,000 people per year (or roughly 70 people per day) die due to these devices.

Many die while trying to collect parts of the metal mines for scrap, or by accidentally triggering the mines. Here’s a look at a few different technologies, both old and new, that are working to clear affected areas of these destructive weapons.

Continue reading “The Real Minesweepers Are Changing Lives and Saving Limbs” »

And tells us how to get there. With a stream of big names revealing their intent to be a part of this upcoming digital world, the metaverse could be a $13 trillion industry by 2030, Citi Bank said in its report.

JP Morgan Chase has become the first bank in the world to set up shop in the metaverse. Its new office is located in the Metajuku Mall in Decentraland, a popular platform for buying real estate in the digital realm, Fortune reported.

Even as technology giants such as Meta and Microsoft are figuring out ways in which they want to build up their versions of the metaverse, real estate in other metaverse platforms are selling like hotcakes. 2021 was the best year in terms of sales valuation for metaverse so far and the numbers are expected to double in 2022. Interestingly, this is all playing out on platforms like Decentraland and Sandbox and JP Morgan wants in.

Continue reading “Metaverse will become a $1 trillion market opportunity, says JP Morgan” »

Rén is a customizable lantern with an integrated OLED screen for users to project whatever moving images or videos they’d like.

Over the past few years, we’ve learned to prioritize what is most important to us. From going to the virtual family reunion to getting creative in the arts, we’re keeping the stuff that matters most to us extra close. Since the pandemic has transformed many of those experiences into digital ones, designers shave been getting creative in making them as large as real life, and sometimes even larger.

Designer: Merve Nur Sökme

When a bubble pops in a liquid, it can produce a flash of light, which we now know is thanks to quantum mechanics.

Sonoluminescence is a phenomenon in which small bubbles, produced and fixed in place by an ultrasound wave in a liquid, collapse and make particles of light, or photons. Physicists have known about this process for decades, but the mechanisms behind it weren’t fully known.

It is intended to be scalable and adaptable to a variety of settings, such as on the rooftops of inner-city buildings. The aim was to design and build a system that could be replicated in both rural areas and on roofs of urban building spaces.

The 130-square-foot structure is constructed from Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) that was milled, dried, processed, and pressed into laminated wooden elements on-site at Valldaura. The glass roof, carefully arranged in a heliomorphic ‘diamond’ shape, allows for full solar capture both by the plants inside and the semi-transparent solar panels integrated within the glass to power the entire structure. The greenhouse only uses about 50% of the energy it produces, leaving the other half for the nearby Valldura Labs facility.

The solar-powered greenhouse also features a fully functional nutrient delivery system consisting of storage tanks, nutrient inflows, tubing to feed the plants directly, and a matrix of LED strip lights to facilitate longer growth cycles. The ground floor will be used for germinating the seedlings that will be planted in the gardens, while the upper level will generate a sizable harvest using advanced hydroponic techniques. All planting beds will use a sawdust substrate, a former waste product of the Green Fab Lab at Valldaura put to imaginative reuse.